lives of colonial cities that after 1770 it became a prominent site for attempts to segregate whites and free people of color, a phenomenon whose political context is described in Chapter 6. The Cap Français theater admitted free men and women of mixed race, who sat in the upper lodges. After 1775 free black women obtained a legal ruling allowing them to attend the theater as well. Mixed-race women refused to sit with them, however, so the petitioners were assigned their own separate section.138 Most theater attendees, however, were white men. Moreau described as extraordinary a performance during the carnival season attended by as many as 130 women, this in a room with 1,500 seats. Moreover at Cap Français there were only 60–80 places out of 1,500 for people of color, compared with 90–120 out of 750 in Port-au-Prince and 7 out of 400 in Léogane.139 Racial borders were thus drawn carefully in this later period.
The appearance of women in the theater audience, especially, was very sexualized, as was fitting for the town where the redoutes des filles de couleur were invented. These dances, where white men could enjoy the charms of seductive women of color, were later translated to New Orleans, becoming the famous “quadroon balls” of the nineteenth century.140 Moreau emphasized how the public display of feminine beauty at the theater overcame even the color line that had become so important by the 1780s. Writing about both white and mixed-race women, he observed, “They go to the show to parade their charms and their suitors; one notes that nearly all women dress with the same elegance, which shows that in the colony the charming sex is divided into only two classes, those who are pretty and those who are not.”141 Indeed, the Comédie was just one of those public spaces in which the city’s role as a sexual marketplace was on full display: “Publicity, I will repeat, is one of their greatest pleasures and it is to this pleasure that we owe the custom that every night at bedtime, one sees the girls of color leave their homes, often lit by a lantern carried by a slave, to go to spend the night with the man they love the best or who pays them the most.”142 Yet Moreau condemned the sexuality of street life in Cap Français and praised the public decorum of women of color in the much smaller port city of Saint-Marc. He observed that “the small number of colored courtesans and the way they dress show that Saint-Marc has not arrived at that excess of civilization where there is a kind of pleasure in offending public decency.”143
Because women of color were on display for white males in the audiences of colonial theaters, as well as on the streets, it is interesting that in the 1780s an actress of color emerged as one of Saint-Domingue’s best-known performers, mentioned some forty times in the colonial press during in a nine-year career. Minette, whose real name was Elizabeth Alexandrine Louise, was born in 1767. Although most free people of color in Saint-Domingue’s cities were poor, Minette’s grandmother was a propertied free woman of color, and her mother, described sometimes as a free quadroon, sometimes as a “mestive,” meaning her ancestry was mostly European, had a widely acknowledged concubinage relationship with Minette’s father, a white naval accountant in Port-au-Prince. The couple had two girls, both of whom had elite white godparents. In 1770 the colonial governor and intendant granted permission for Minette’s mother to accompany her father back to France, though it isn’t clear if the couple also took their daughters there.144
Trained to sing and act by a white actress named Mme. Acquaire, Minette first appeared on stage in 1780 at the age of fourteen to sing arias in a Christmas performance in Port-au-Prince. Two months later, the director of the city’s theater hired her for 8,000 livres or £347 per year, a sizeable sum for a beginning performer in this colony where singers regularly earned between 3,000 and 12,000 livres annually. Although free colored and enslaved musicians and singers did perform in colonial theaters, Minette’s leading roles on the stage were still controversial. Moreau de Saint-Méry, despite his opinions about the dangers free colored courtesans posed to the colonial public, celebrated Minette’s “triumph” over colonial prejudices.145 We know little about Minette’s private life. Like most free women of color she did not marry. In 1786 a French mapmaker in Port-au-Prince gave her two enslaved girls in his will, specifying that “she was the only person who helped me in this country where I had no family [and] where I would have certainly died given the nature of my illness.”146 But there is no other suggestion that this was a concubinage relationship like that between her mother and father.
Like Constantia Phillips in Jamaica, Minette called on Saint-Domingue’s public to embrace its European identity. In a 1782 newspaper advertisement she decried “those ephemeral productions that bastardize and degrade the lyric stage, which are only local and which very often only address the everyday events of private society.”147 This statement was not merely a reference to the widespread use of tropical sets, costumes, and creole dialog and lyrics.148 Minette was also criticizing the racial stereotypes that increasingly defined even freeborn people of color like her as part of the enslaved population. For example, in 1786 the husband of her former acting teacher produced a pantomime entitled Arlequin mulâtresse sauvé par Macandal (Arlequin, Mulâtresse Saved by Macandal).149 The text no longer exists, but Macandal was an escaped slave said to be the mastermind of a poisoning conspiracy, an episode we examine in Chapter 5. Minette’s sister Lise appears to have performed in such plays, for example, as in the 1786 performance of Les Amours de Mirebalais (The Loves of Mirebalais),150 a colonial adaption of Rousseau’s opera Le Devin du village (The Village Soothsayer).151 Minette’s public defense of the French theatrical tradition against ephemeral colonial productions shows that she rejected being defined solely by her race or sexuality, even if she worked in an occupation and in a space that was highly sexualized. Minette seems to have wanted to highlight the theater, as Lauren Clay puts it, as “an imaginary … that represented … a world in which free people of color could be fully and equally French.”152
The lives of Teresia Phillips and Minette show that we need to be skeptical about descriptions of women in these societies. Their admittedly extraordinary careers belie the sharp contrasts that Long and Moreau made between passive but consuming white women and passionate but corrupting free women of color. These were working women, who defined themselves by what they did as actresses and devotees of the theater, rather than by their maternal role or even by their relation to white men. The distance between what white women and free women of color actually did was not that great in mid-eighteenth-century Jamaica and Saint-Domingue. Colonial ideologies stressed the distance between the two, especially after the Seven Years’ War and the American Revolution, as efforts to make racial categories more distinct took hold in both colonies. What the lives of both women outlined in this chapter show is that, for freeborn people, urban society was a place of opportunity and, to some extent, liberation. While the mix of people and cultures, the lack of conventional religious institutions, and the prevailing materialism bewildered commentators, this “chaos of men” or “excess of civilization” provided a way for women like Phillips and Minette to construct identities that defied stereotypes.
By the start of the Seven Years’ War, both Saint-Domingue and Jamaica had moved past the frontier stage of their development. They had established themselves as conspicuously successful plantation societies. They were culturally vibrant, dynamic, and economically valuable imperial possessions. Commentators new to West Indian mores and West Indian slavery found them disturbing places, where much of quotidian existence seemed immoral or at least dysfunctional. The harshness of slavery contrasted strongly with white peoples’ devotion to pleasures of the flesh; the colonies had become vital imperial possessions, but colonists were only partially attached to European norms. White elites rejected religion, paid little attention to social rank, and embraced money as the measure of all things.
In the next forty years, these characteristics became more firmly entrenched as Jamaica and Saint-Domingue entered into the period of their greatest prosperity. It was also a period in which Jamaica and Saint-Domingue became important within the geopolitics of the French and British Atlantic empires. That geopolitical importance became clear during the Seven Years’ War, despite the fact that it was largely fought
